Kingwin Big Air BA-12 for AMD

Kingwin’s BA-12 shares a similar design with the popular Thermalright XP-120. A copper base plate connects to an aluminum heatsink, which is aligned parallel to the motherboard. A 12cm fan blows air over the heatsink, cooling the fins and also all the components around the CPU socket.

The downward-facing fan works very well on our A8N32 motherboard, which uses a heat pipe to transfer heat away from the chipset. The heat pipe ends in a small copper heatsink near the CPU, which is cooled by runoff airflow from the CPU cooler.

Installation is practically effortless. The heatsink uses the standard AMD retention mechanism, with a snap-on three-hole clamp. The cool thing (no pun intended) is that the 12cm fan snaps onto the heatsink via a spring-loaded clamp. It’s a simple design that makes installation of the cooler and fan much easier.

Unfortunately, the BA-12 posted temperatures that were slightly higher than the other coolers. We blame the heatsink’s relatively small size. Its 2,000rpm fan ran quiet, and sports nifty blue LEDs, but it doesn’t keep the sink as cool as we’d like.